


feverish

by elle_stone



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Grimmauld Place, M/M, Spring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-10
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-05 02:37:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's spring fever...you don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!"  --Mark Twain</p>
            </blockquote>





	feverish

**Author's Note:**

> Written in April 2008 for prompt number 5, the Mark Twain quote that I used as my summary, at the barefootboys community on livejournal.

Spring fever Sirius answers when Remus asks him why he is like this: bounding up on him as soon as he comes through the door. Remus thinks it’s probably just Grimmauld Place, making Sirius insane again. Oh but those were terrible weeks before he ran away the first time, but if he goes again there won’t be any Mr. and Mrs. Potters’ to run to.

At night they open the windows to Remus’s room. Sirius calls it Remus’s room. It’s a guest room really. Sirius sleeps there every night and Remus sleeps there when he isn’t off on Order business. They’ve spelled it and aired it and yet it still smells like old tattered ghosts and the backs of closets.

I just want…I just want…I just want…

Sirius chants out in low rhythms, trailing whispers down Remus’s skin, breeze blowing in over skin, skin touching skin after so many years and it aches.

Don’t do anything stupid Remus whispers. Fuck, if I lost you again.

Ever since they met they’ve known danger. Werewolf bites, breaking the law, masses of Death Eaters even in the shadows of their innocenct schooldays. War. War that broke through their first attempts at adulthood, renting thunder through them. They’ve known the danger of elbows jamming together in broom closets and broom rides through lightning storms and graveyards of splitting stone and charred family houses and they’ve known what it’s like to have their bodies taken from them, and their freedom thrown away. Out there what Remus sees now is more war, prison, even death, but Sirius just wants adventure as if he were fifteen again and adventure meant a run under the full moon.

Sirius gets up early and makes breakfast. He was never very good at cooking, but he’s learning. Nothing else to do here, anyway, he says. He’s calmer today. Remus sits on the other side of the table. He told himself he’d never need a person like this. He doesn’t know what he’s done to himself. Previous boyfriends have told him that he’s too reserved, cringes too much from another’s touch, falls too long into introspective silence—but Sirius never tells him these things.

Remus will be home for three days and in this time he and Sirius will battle Black family ghosts and cast the first cooling spells of the year and sometimes Sirius will get excited, like he’s on the brink of some great things. You’re always leaving me Remus he says once to make Remus feel guilty and it works, but one day soon I think I’m going to leave you.

Remus doesn’t know what he’s talking about, doesn’t want to know but wants to cling to Sirius so he’ll never leave again—but he asks anyway and Sirius changes the subject. Later he denies knowing anything about it. The nights cool down but Sirius won’t let Remus close the window and on the third night, hours before Remus leaves, he lies on top of the bed covers with a cool towel against his skin and says he feels feverish. Skin flushes under Remus’s hand.

If he runs away again, this time, there won’t be anywhere left to go.


End file.
